This blog focuses on news and information regarding practice in the federal courts in the Eastern District of California, with a special emphasis on criminal and civil rights cases.

Blog Author

John Balazs is an attorney in Sacramento, California, specializing in criminal defense, including appeals, habeas corpus, pardons, expungements, and civil forfeiture actions. After graduating from UCLA Law School in 1989, he clerked for Judge Harry Pregerson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. John was an Assistant Federal Defender in Fresno and Sacramento from 1992-2001. He currently serves as an adjunct professor in clinical trial advocacy at the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law. Please email EDCA items of interest to Balazslaw@gmail.com. Follow me on twitter @balazslaw.

Disclaimer

This blog is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this blog should be construed as legal advice. The law can change rapidly and information in this blog can become outdated. Do your own research or consult with an attorney.

Civil Rights Lawsuits

April 24, 2017

In a trial underway in front of U.S. District Court Judge Kimberly J. Mueller, plaintiffs want a jury to find nine corrections department employees liable for malice and oppression to rectify abuses they say their client suffered during a brutal 2012 cell extraction.

Along with general damages, the attorneys say a punitive award would send a message to the prison system and its staff on how to carry out the best practices – and avoid the worst – when inmates have full-blown psychotic breakdowns.

“Since at least 1995, CDCR officials, medical providers, and custody officers have been on notice that the Constitution requires prisons to provide incarcerated persons with necessary mental health care and to treat prisoners in a humane manner that does not punish them for mental illness,” plaintiffs lawyer Lori Rifkin wrote in her trial brief.

Rifkin said the videotaped 2012 cell extraction of her client, Jermaine Padilla, who was seen being pepper sprayed and dragged out screaming and strapped naked to a gurney for 72 hours, demonstrated that “almost two decades later, CDCR had still failed to correct these constitutional deprivations."

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Padilla’s lawyers filed the case in 2014, nearly two decades after the late U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence K. Karlton in the long-running Coleman v. Brown class-action lawsuit found the state’s treatment of mentally ill prisoners in violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

The Padilla lawsuit came a year after the class-action lawyers obtained videos of six cell extractions, including his, in which psychiatrically impaired prisoners were pepper sprayed in their cells. One of them at Mule Creek State Prison, Joseph Duran, later died, and his family and won a $750,000 settlement.

April 23, 2017

The Del Paso Heights man repeatedly punched by a Sacramento police officer during a questionable jaywalking stop alleges he was abused in the Sacramento County Main Jail during his subsequent arrest.

In a lengthy interview, Nandi Cain Jr. said that the arresting police officer and Sacramento County sheriff’s deputies painfully restrained him, forcibly stripped him as part of an unwarranted psychiatric hold and called him disparaging obscenities.

Cain, 24, said he will file a federal civil rights lawsuit by Monday against both the city and county of Sacramento.

April 12, 2017

With Matthew Muller's federal kidnapping case concluding with a guilty plea and 40-year sentence, the Sacramento Bee has a lengthy article on ongoing skirmishes in the EDCA civil lawsuit his victims filed against the City of Vallejo and its police department over their handling of the investigation.

February 06, 2017

The city of Sacramento has announced it has resolved a civil lawsuit in the July fatal police shooting of Joseph Mann, confirming reports from earlier in the week.

In an unattributed statement issued late Wednesday, the city said “there is no admission of liability on the part of the city,” but “at this time it is in the best interest of the city, and all parties to settle this matter.”

The city has agreed to pay $719,000 to Mann’s father, William Mann Sr., according to a source close to negotiations. The city did not immediately respond Thursday to a request to confirm the amount.

John Burris, a noted civil rights lawyer who represented William Mann, said that while the settlement amount was not as large as those given in other police-shooting cases across the country, the litigation was successful because it spurred police reforms.

July 13, 2016

High-profile attorney Richard Berman has settled his federal civil-rights lawsuit against the Fresno County Sheriff’s Office for $250,000 in a case that he says solidifies a person’s right to question authority.

“They push people around all the time,” Berman said Tuesday. “Finally, someone stood up to them.”

In his lawsuit, Berman contended that a female sheriff’s deputy roughed him up in the lobby of the downtown Fresno criminal courthouse in March 2012, arrested him and publicly humiliated him in a dispute over a child’s plastic toy.

June 24, 2016

A federal judge on Friday was leaning toward making public confidential Clovis police documents regarding one of four officers involved in the alleged beating of a motorcyclist in September 2012.

“Documents used in judicial proceedings are presumed to be public record,” Magistrate Judge Barbara A. McAuliffe said in U.S. District Court.

The case involves George Macias Jr., 24, who says in his federal civil rights lawsuit that four Clovis police officers savagely beat him while he was handcuffed and used a stun gun on him. He is seeking unspecified damages for alleged violation of his civil rights, assault, battery, excessive force, malicious prosecution and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

June 17, 2016

The Fresno Bee covers the federal civil rights trial over the shooting death of Veronica Lynn Canter by two Fresno police officers. According to Bee reporter Pablo Lopez's twitter feed (@beecourts), the jury went out to deliberate at 2:35 p.m. on the question whether the two officers used excessive force during their confrontation with Ms. Canter.

June 13, 2016

Jury selection and opening statements begin Tuesday, June 14 in the civil rights trial of Knox v. City of Fresno, No. 1:14-CV-00799-EPG in Fresno District Court before the Hon. Erica P. Grosjean. Morrison & Foerster partners Arturo González and Wes Overson represent the family of Veronica Canter, a mentally ill woman who was fatally shot by Fresno police in March 2014. Phase 1 of the trial will challenge the reasonableness of the use of force; if necessary, Phase 2 will address the Fresno police department’s failure to properly train and discipline its officers.